Coal to liquids

A new coal to liquids plant has recently been proposed - and as could be expected from the americans, it's very popular. The plant would produce around 100 million gallons (approaching 5 billion liters) of petrol a year.
The major reason is their unwillingness to rely on anyone else for their crude oil supply.

The proposed plant would have carbon capture and storage bolted onto it which, as far as the figures that I've seen suggest, means that the lifecycle emissions for the plant (including fuel carbon) would be comparable to that of an oil well.

This is a bad thing.

We know that unstopable global warming will take place if we continue with a business as normal approach. This is a business as normal approach, and we will not be able to reduce these emissions further - current technology is at full stretch here.

It's a typical american solution - when oil gets expensive they find more, rather than modify their behaviour.